Motherhood

A lot has happened since my last post, as I'm sure many of you could guess.  I promise that after this post I will try not to be baby obsessed.  

So, on November 28th I was pretty sure I was going to have a baby.  I woke up at 3:30 and couldn't go back to sleep.  So, of course I paced the living room and desperately tried to finish knitting the bonnet that went with the outfit I had knit.  My due date was the 30th of Nov. so I had figured I had another week at least of horrible horrible pregnancy and hadn't rushed to finish the little hat.  

Max woke up around 7 or 8 and we decided to go about our day normally.  Me and Max and our housemate Jes went to Satellite and got coffee and snacks and we walked and walked and walked.  I went home and pretended to nap, called my mom and demanded we get Ethiopian take out.  Teresa came over with her baby in the hopes that he would send secret messages to Flippy that the world outside was the place to be.  Mom arrived and brought snacks.  

Then everything got sort of fuzzy.  I remember moments like eating pudding at the kitchen table.  I remember asking my mom to rub my belly and then yelling at her to stop touching me.  I remember taking a shower.  Two showers?  Max was there I think.  In any case, things happened and then there was a baby at 12:45 am.  Doesn't Max look tired?

It was only really bad labor for about 8 hours and then he shot into the world after 15 mins of pushing so from what I hear I'm really lucky.  He weighed 6 lbs 10 oz and was 19 1/4" long.  I kept telling him to stay small.  Good baby.  The worst part of labor?  Contractions.  The second worst part?  Having a cold that includes a hacking cough.  The worst part of postpartum?  The cracked rib that I had to heal from the combo of contractions and coughing.  It wasn't until 2 weeks ago that I could sleep comfortably.  

Here's me and my mom and Clyde in his cool 4-Ply Soft outfit, minus the hat I tried to finish the previous morning.
Okay, so the details out of the way we can get on to the fashion show.  This is his cool outfit in a close up, it's a basic top down raglan cardigan using 2 balls of Rowan 4-ply Soft.  It has garter stitch edges and 5 buttons.  
Underneath the sweater is a bunting I designed.  It's out of the same yarn with an amazingly well matched satin ribbon tying the bottom closed.  

Here's a nice detail of the button.  The top is done in garter stitch because I really couldn't bring myself to purl that late in a pregnancy.  The body is done in the round up to the armhole then some stitches are cast of on either side and it's just knit up the back and front.  

The pattern will be coming soon.  I don't think I took any notes while I was knitting this, I just sort-of made it up as I went along.  So much has happened since then that if I had notes I have no idea where they are now.  It'll be an evening of counting stitches.  Ugh.  Max has been in on the knitting too, and knit this awesome Koigu hat.  He used the James Dean hat pattern from Rosie Knits and just used a size 2 needle and Koigu instead of the size 8's and Kureyon.  Voila!  Genius, really.  This is the cutest baby hat ever and everyone should knit one.  They make babies look like little elves.  

This is Basil, one of my patterns, but done in Koigu.  I have to give Wendy props for doing this first, I am really just a copycat.  I am really hoping that this blanket becomes "The Blanket."  I wouldn't mind knitting it over and over again as one wears out and another one has to sneak into it's place.  

There's more knitwear to come, but I have to keep some fodder for the blog.  

In more news, I just returned from TNNA in Long Beach.  I took the cashew with me and Max came too so that I could experiment with being babyless for periods of time.  It was an adventure but we managed to pull it off.  The flights all went swimmingly and we discovered that the cashew enjoys a good pacifier now and then.  It's becoming more now than then however.  We got to Long Beach Thursday afternoon, met up with Lisa and ate tons of food, fitting for a breastfeeding parent who just traveled for 12 hours.  I ached all over and was incredibly tired and chalked it up to being tired and crammed into an airline seat for so long.  So you can guess at my surprise when I woke up in the middle of the night aching all over with chills and discovering I had a fever of 101.  Yikes!  I had mastitis.  That's an infection in your BOOB!  Oh, god.  Back to sleep, at 8 am called doctor, sent Max to Walgreens, slept.  At 4:30 I wa a new person.  I went to the showfloor and tried to salvage part of my day.  Day 2 of the show was much more successful.  I ran around like a crazy person and Max took the cashew to the Aquarium.  I wish I had pictures but I took dead camera batteries with me.  We did buy a disposable camera but that requires physically going to the drugstore and I'm just not willing to do that unless I have 5 other things I need there.  Doing anything now takes 5 million years.  

I successfully spent an entire day without the cashew.  Whoo-hoo!  I touched great yarn and ate good food.  It was successful in the end.  And now we're home and I am back at work and life is back to normal, sort of.